Grace Wins Haven is having another volunteer training session, gearing up for winter, this Sunday, Nov. 18, at 1 pm. Also, the homeless facility is in need of sharing their supply list again. Here’s what they need:

Family Promise of Lincoln County announces its first Tsunami Run to help fund their Homeless Program in Lincoln County.

The innovative fundraising workout will see teams of three people meet at one of four participating gyms in Lincoln City on March 22nd and take part in a 30 minute run/walk on a treadmill. Exceptions will be made for those with health issues who choose to participate on another machine such as a stationary bicycle. “This is an event for any level of athlete to join.” stated Sue Anderson, Family Promise Board President. “Just the fun of getting together with two other people to help these families through donations can be the goal. Get your friends together and sign up for a good time.”

The teams signs up at a favorite workout location and a set time slot at that gym. Two winning teams will be named including both the team with the most donations raised as well as a team with the most miles recorded in the 30 minute time slot. Two awesome gift packages will be given to the winning teams. All proceeds will support Family Promise in helping families experiencing homelessness get back on their feet and into their own homes again.

“We are so lucky this year to have a grant from the Collins Foundation to receive matching funds for any donation made by a person giving to Family Promise for the first time.” added Elizabeth Reyes, Executive Director of Family Promise. “Teams just need to let us know who the new donor is and they will get credit for twice the amount donated by that person.”

Participating gyms have paperwork, sign-up sheets and time slots available. Call or stop in to register.

Family Promise of Lincoln County is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide shelter, meals and comprehensive assistance to homeless and low-income families with children in Lincoln County while they seek to achieve sustainable independent living. This is achieved through a collaborative community effort and based off a proven successful national model that partners with local congregations and social service agencies to provide practical and effective services. For more information, call Family Promise at 541-614-0964.

If there are parallels between Bazta Arpaio and LUCHA’s campaign for Prop 206, it’s likely because many of the organizers trained together and share a theory of change—one that focuses on training leaders from the most directly affected communities.

NEWPORT — One out of every eight students in Lincoln County aren’t certain where they’ll sleep tonight, up from one in nine students by the end of last year.

The number of homeless kids in the region continues to grow, according to a running tally kept by the Lincoln County School District’s Homeless Education and Literacy Project (HELP). And with more than two months left in the school year, that number will keep going up, said HELP Homeless Program Coordinator Katey Townsend.

During the 2014-15 school year, 717 students were identified as homeless in the district, including 579 in the K-12 schools. The remaining 138 children included younger students, often siblings enrolled in pre-kindergarten programs.

This year, that figure had already reached 707 students by the end of the first semester.

“At the midyear point, we were at the same amount as the whole school year prior,” Townsend said. “When we pulled the numbers up at the end of the semester, we were feeling overwhelmed by the need in the community. The numbers just validated that.”

They hit 817 students by an updated tally on April 11, 2016, with 654 homeless students enrolled in K-12 schools.

“Still, we have an influx of referrals.”

Last year, Lincoln County had already ranked highest in the state for homeless children, according to a 2015 study by Children First for Oregon. Ten percent of Lincoln County’s children were homeless, according to the report, compared with the statewide average of 3.3 percent.

HELP uses the national criteria for identifying a homeless child. Included in that definition are children living in a shelter, a car, a campsite, a motel, or with a friend or family member.

The majority of the reported homeless students are living with friends or family, a situation HELP refers to as “doubled up.” However, those situations often lead to more dire circumstances, Townsend said.

“We see a lot of movement between the categories,” Townsend said. “We have to report on how they were first qualified — the first circumstance in which we met them in the school year.”

This creates some misrepresentation in reporting. While 525 of the reported 817 students are categorized as “doubled up,” many of them have since moved into cars or shelters, Townsend said.

Between this year and last year, HELP didn’t make any changes to its reporting practices, or in how it identifies homeless students. Townsend attributes the spike to a precarious local economy and tough housing market.

“What I’m hearing across the county is that there’s just no place for families to live,” Townsend said. “As soon as a rental gets on the market, it gets snapped up usually the same day.”

The issue is compounded by the region’s seasonal industries, including tourism and fishing, said Lincoln County Commissioner Bill Hall.

“The nature of our economy is a big driver of it. Tourism has so many part-time and low-wage jobs,” Hall said, adding that the average age of a minimum wage employee in the county is 31 years old.

Even for families who could afford to pay the rent on a reasonably priced home, often times that place just doesn’t exist.

“(We’ve) always had a low rental vacancy rate,” Hall said. “For a long time in Lincoln County, it’s been 2 percent. It’s now less than 1 percent.”

He partially credits the recent drop to a rise in technology. The ease of websites like Craigslist and Airbnb made it more convenient — and often more lucrative — for landlords to rent property on a nightly basis.

“What I hear again and again (from) a lot of people who own rentals is that they were renting on a month-to month basis, and they have converted them from monthly rentals to nightly rentals,” Hall said.

The staffat HELP is well acquainted with the region’s rental issues. Homelessness has always pervaded Lincoln County, Townsend said.

However, she said they weren’t entirely prepared for how quickly their enrollment would spike in just a year.

“We couldn’t do this work without community donations, both with people who drop offjackets and shoes and school supplies, or they drop offchecks,” Townsend said.

There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.”— John Holmes, U.S. Army veteran

The ninth annual Project Homeless Connect will take place on Thursday, Jan. 28, at the Newport Church of the Nazarene, located at 227 NW 12th St.The event provides a variety of services for those who are in need, everything from health care to haircuts, from obtaining a legal ID to care for their canine companions. And there has been such a demand for the dental care provided at previous events that dental services will be expanded to include the following day, Jan. 29.

Lincoln County Commissioner Bill Hall also serves as president of the board for Samaritan House, which operates a shelter for homeless families with children. He said Project Homeless Connect “is a really important event, not only getting services to people on the day of the event, but I think it has important spillover e•ects throughout the year.” Some homeless people have said knowing resources are there and that caring people are there makes a huge difference for them, said Hall, and he added it’s a great event for helping raise awareness of the homeless situation in Lincoln County.

Organizers are still looking for volunteers to help with the event on Jan. 28. Lola Jones, executive director of Samaritan House, said the only requirement is “a willingness to make a human connection.”People who volunteer do so for many reasons. One person involved with a previous Project Homeless Connect asked this question: “If you could make someone’s life better in just one day, would you?”Those who reach out to help others through an event like this will often find that they receive as much of a blessing as those they are there to serve. A volunteer at a past event said, “This was definitely a very humbling experience for me. The clients that I helped throughout the day were so kind and caring.”

There are a lot of things in this world that we have no control over, but reaching out and helping others is not one of them. It’s a choice we can make. We have the opportunity to make someone’s life better in many ways, and Project Homeless Connect is one of them.Those who want to get involved with this year’s event can find a volunteer application form online at http://tinyurl.com/PHCvolunteer or they can call 541-574-2684.— STEVE CARD

he United States’ embarrassing maternal mortality figures are closely tied to extreme economic inequality, and better understanding of one will help the other.

Imagine that each year six U.S. passenger jets crashed, killing all passengers on board. Imagine that every person who died on those planes was a woman who was pregnant or recently gave birth. Instead of offering interventions and regulations that might prevent more planes from falling from the sky, lawmakers attempted to defund and repeal the very programs meant to improve air safety. That, in a nutshell, is the maternal mortality crisis in the United States.

Today, more U.S. women die in childbirth and from pregnancy-related causes than at almost any point in the last 25 years. The United States is the one of only seven countries in the entire world that has experienced an increase in maternal mortality over the past decade (we join the likes of Afghanistan and South Sudan), and mothers in Iran, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Serbia and Greece (among many other countries) have a better chance of surviving pregnancy than do women in the United States.

It should be no surprise that maternal mortality rates (MMRs) have risen in tandem with poverty rates. The two are inextricably linked. Women living in the lowest-income areas in the United States are twice as likely to suffer maternal death, and states with high rates of poverty have MMRs 77 percent higher than states with fewer residents living below the federal poverty level. Black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women, and in some U.S. cities the MMR among Black women is higher than in some sub-Saharan African countries.

New research suggests that one of the many factors driving this crisis might be inequality. We may have just celebrated the dawn of 2015, but in terms of economic inequality it might as well be 1929, the last time the United States experienced such an extraordinary gulf between the rich and the, well, everyone else. Today nearly one in three Blacks and one in four Hispanics (compared to one in ten whites) live in poverty, and in certain states those percentages are even higher. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the net worth of the poorest Americans has decreased and stagnant wages and increased debt has driven more middle class families into poverty. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans have enjoyed remarkable gains in wealth and income. Those in the top one percent have seen their incomes increase by as much as 200.5 percent over the past 30 years, while those in the bottom 99 percent have seen their incomes grow by only 18.9 percent during that same time.

As the financial well-being of the majority of Americans has eroded, so too has their health. A recentstudy conducted by Amani Nuru-Jeter from University of California, Berkeley shows that inequality has very different impacts on Black and white Americans. The study found that each unit increase in income inequality results in an additional 27 to 37 deaths among African Americans, and – interestingly – 417 to 480 fewer deaths among white Americans. Nuru-Jeter and her colleagues were surprised to discover the inverse relationship between inequality and death for whites, and suggested that more research is needed to better understand it. “We do know that the proportion of high-income people compared to low-income people is higher for whites than for African Americans. It’s possible that the protective effects we are seeing represent the net effect of income inequality for high-income whites,” she said.

The research shows us that rising tides might lift some boats, but it sinks others. And it is unclear if the boats of poor whites actually rise, or if it just appears like they rise because of the higher concentration of people benefitting from inequality in white communities compared to black communities.

Either way, we know that the boats of women of color have certainly not been rising in recent years and these recent findings beg us to ask how inequality is impacting U.S. mothers specifically. After all, we know that women of color have been disproportionately impacted by the economic downturn. Today the poverty rate for black women is 28.6 percent, compared with 10.8 percent for white women. A 2010 studyfound that the median wealth for single Black and Hispanic women was only $100 and $120 respectively, while the median wealth for single white women was just over $41,000. And in the years following the recession Black women represented 12.5 percent of all American workers but accounted for more than 42 percent of jobs lost by all women. Black women have an unemployment rate nearly double that of white women.

Given these grim statistics, it should be no surprise that inequality and maternal-related deaths have increased on parallel tracks over the last decade. But while inequality – and its threats to the economy and the wellbeing of average people – has recently gained long overdue attention, maternal mortality remains an invisible health crisis (unless, of course, you live in one of the communities where it’s all too common for women to die from pregnancy). The media rarely talks about it, foundations aren’t collaborating to invest in initiatives to help us understand – let alone improve – the situation, and policy makers aren’t even pretending to care about it. In fact, the conservative-dominated Congress seems eager to trim or prevent the very programs that help mothers have a healthy foundation for pregnancy: food stamps, reproductive health coverage and access, and wage increases, just to name a few.

The Affordable Care Act is providing much-needed health coverage to many poor women for whom it was previously out of reach and if fully implemented could certainly help stem maternal deaths. But conservative members of Congress are doing their best to make it as ineffective as possible for the people who need it the most. Nearly 60 percent of uninsured Black Americans who should qualify for Medicaid live in states that are not participating in Medicaid expansion. And a recent study found that as a result of conservative opposition to expansion, 40 percent of uninsured Blacks who should have Medicaid coverage will not get it (compared to 24 percent of uninsured Hispanics and 29 percent of uninsured whites).

Nuru-Jeter’s research shows us that we will need a host of strategies to tackle deaths in the Black community, and maternal deaths are certainly no exception. Better understanding how inequality might be driving unnecessary deaths among women of color would better enable us to identify exactly what those strategies should be and how they should be implemented. And perhaps we wouldn’t get all boats to rise immediately, but it just might get them all to float. It’s sad we aren’t even trying to accomplish that much.

Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Follow her on Twitter @dreaflynn.